


Take My Body

by poetsandzombies



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Forgiveness, Ghost Eddie Kaspbrak, Grief/Mourning, Love Confessions, M/M, hey that's a tag alright, not a traditional happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25276405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetsandzombies/pseuds/poetsandzombies
Summary: There’s an old legend, deep in the tired, cracked roads of the Derry, Maine—told in the late afternoons from the broken mouths of latchkey kids kicking empty soda cans between their cuffed-up sneakers, about the haunting on the lower-east end of Witcham street.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	Take My Body

**Author's Note:**

> For what it's worth, Eddie is alive and well in all universes. But this fic is about grief, and forgiveness, and finding a space to move on when there is no silver lining.  
> TW for some mild body horror

There’s an old legend, deep in the tired, cracked roads of the Derry, Maine—told in the late afternoons from the broken mouths of latchkey kids kicking empty soda cans between their cuffed-up sneakers, about the haunting on the lower-east end of Witcham Street. People don’t _die_ there, they say. Dying is for the in-town folks, the hometown heroes; like living here is _punishable_ by death. There’s enough tragedy in these soils to consider the redundancy in calling one small chunk of road cursed for it.

But if you were passing through and happened to ask the right local, in the right bar, at the right time of day, they might tell you, around a mouthful of Oliver Twist’s chewing tobacco, that the wooded ends of asphalt nearing the edge of town, just a few miles down from the kissing bridge, is where people have been known to come _back_.

Since the early 1800s, lonesome and heavy-hearted townsfolk have reported sightings of the loved and lost on this road—stumbling ghost-like and frail out of the woods, still with their bullet wounds and sallow skin drooping from the gnarled bones of their pasts. Like Derry was spittin them back out, almost. Maybe they weren’t done yet, maybe they were looking for something. Or, maybe, something was looking for them.

But never mind the _why_ right now. It’s on that same road, leading out and away from darkness, that Richie Tozier first sees Eddie Kaspbrak since Neibolt, the night of September 9th, 1985.

It’s late November now, and he’s following the backroads out of town in dead quiet, a white-knuckled grip over the steering wheel, eager to cross the state line and forget again. He won’t, of course. He hasn’t forgotten a second of this life since he remembered it. But it would be kindness tonight, to the beltless grief clunking around in the backseat, and the tread in these tires, as he drives back to his one-bedroom apartment from Eddie’s funeral.

Not his _official_ funeral, which was held a month prior—like he or any of Eddie’s old friends would have been invited to that—but what does that matter when nobody had a body to bury?

He sees him in the reflection of his glasses, coming out from the underbrush on the edge of town, a nightmare shrinking and shrinking in his rearview mirror as Richie drives past. He looks exactly as they left him that night—mud-soaked and bloody, a hole in his chest almost the size of Richie’s.

Richie closes his eyes and drives on. Another time of day, another part of town, might see him crash his car or pull over and fall out towards the woods, tunnel-visioned and delirious—might see him scrambling toward those lost and lovely limbs he thought were gone for good. Here though, he closes his eyes, makes a note to switch over to contacts again, and drives on.

But these things follow you home, relentless and unwavering _. Hello, come on in. Leave your grief at the door. This is happening. The phone is ringing off the hook._

He sees him next in the slim mirror of his bathroom as he’s bent over the sink studying his aging face, counting the gray hairs in his overgrown beard like the way a mother marks a child’s growth on the frame of the doorway—he's standing in the hallway behind him as he tries to revert back to a time he can’t remember.

“You gonna answer that?” Eddie asks. “I think it’s Bill.”

Richie curses, bruising the edge of the counter with his grip, and doesn’t move for a long time. There is something in not moving—something in the stark white stillness where he could never before be, that feels powerful. Like it can stop all things.

But this is happening.

Eddie is still there when he turns around, clutching his abdomen like he’s trying to close a wound. He is still there, and he is real, _real_ , like passing time—time passing even in stillness—wet and bleeding out in Richie’s hallway.

He doesn’t look lost, which is how Richie _knows_ he’s real.

“Please,” he begs. “You can’t be here.”

Eddie speaks with his hollowed-out mouth and black teeth, the words falling out from the memory he unburied himself from. “I’m not.”

So Richie takes his glasses off, because it’s all he knows, and is struck with the blurry features of Eddie twenty years before—with his cotton candy mouth and small freckled arms, a still frame from a time before they knew what would become of them, a time they can never get back to, and Richie crumbles like he’s trying to shrink himself—trying to be twelve again, but all these twelve-year-old boys are dead and he doesn’t know who he’s mourning for, he

puts his glasses back on. Eddie is Eddie again, but cleaner now. Maybe a day or two before he died. He’s easier to look at and somehow not. Richie takes a deep breath and holds onto the walls for support as he claws his way out of the bathroom, past Eddie down the hallway. The phone is ringing again.

“You never sent _me_ to voicemail.”

Richie ignores the voice ricocheting through his empty apartment until he’s made it into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.

“Well. I was in love with you,” he says to the corpse in his kitchen, who smiles with his big eyes and pink freckles like he’s never heard it. But Richie’s said it before.

Like he could ever forget that night. The hand on his chest, the crooked rock in his side, the unintelligible and desperate confession. _Eddie please stay. Eddie please don’t move. Eddie you are all I know_.

Maybe he was already dead.

Eddie’s gaze follows him out into the living room, where the carpet on his bare feet makes him feel real again. “I loved you too, you know,” he says softly. “I didn’t get a chance to say it then. The, um…” Richie turns to look at him when he hears him struggling over his words, and he gestures to his chest. Richie can see the faint outline where his killing wound used to be, like a coffee stain on his white cotton t-shirt. “Sorta knocked the breath out of me.”

Oh Eddie, Eddie with the rainboots, Eddie with the tube socks, Eddie with the summer laugh and winter asthma, Eddie splotched in evening sunlight, kicking up dirt by the bend in the creek, Eddie giving himself room to love in tight spaces, kind Eddie

(dead Eddie)

loved him back. He can feel his insides peeling like wallpaper to the graveyard of his chest Eddie fell victim to. He sits on his couch as the phone starts to ring again.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

Eddie shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. I needed you to know.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I’m _not_ here,” Eddie repeats, firm. Almost frightened.

Richie sinks further into the cushions and looks at him. Really looks at him. God it’s good to see him again. “Where are you then, Eddie? I’m—I’m _looking_ for you. I’ve been trying to figure it out.”

But how did he say it out loud? _Come in, sit down?_ _Why are you dead? Why am I alone at night? What is supposed to come of this?_

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Eddie says, reading the wrinkled marks on Richie’s face. He was always good at that, though he didn’t know it. “I _should_ be here. I _should_ be happy. I _should_ be with you.”

He says it with that honest, broken despair that sends Richie surging off the couch, forgetting himself and the time of day.

“So _be_ with me,” he grits out. He reaches out for Eddie and freezes, horror-stricken, when his hand passes through his chest.

Eddie looks down between the two of them, the stain on his shirt darkening, and meets Richie’s eyes with his own, frowning. 

“Some things just _shouldn’t_ have happened,” he whispers.

“Be with me,” Richie says again in a state of half-delirium. _Oh, this is a blessing, not a curse._ He holds his hand against his chest like it’s burned.

Eddie shakes his head, calm demeanor crumbling beneath Richie’s panic. “Maybe…maybe I’m no good for you like this, Richie. You can’t even touch me.”

“I don’t care.”

He doesn’t. Who needs the touching when you have the seeing and the talking? He can love a dead man. Who cares about the hand holding and the kissing and the sun-warm skin on skin and the tangled limbs in secret places and all the times Eddie took his glasses and his fingers brushed his cheeks and they hugged and his hands brushed his neck and they walked and their arms brushed against each other and how he felt about that and all the places, places, places his body would never be again. Who cares, his apartment is rotting, _who cares_.

He swallows. Eddie is hugging himself away from Richie, his shirt now a deep, dark red. It looks wet. 

“You really should answer that.”

Richie scowls as the ringing starts back up again. “I just spent 48 hours with them. I don’t want to talk to them.”

“Why?” Eddie asks.

“Because they _left you down there_ , Eddie,” Richie says with his whole, shaking breath. “We buried an empty grave yesterday because they just _left_ you down there.”

Eddie reaches out to him, seems to remember, and pulls back into himself. “Richie, I’m not mad at them.”

Richie’s next words come out a broken half-sob, loud and inaudible all at once. “WHAT ABOUT ME? ** _I_** LEFT YOU.”

Eddie makes a quiet “oh” face of realization, and they fall silent for a stretch of time. In it, Richie tries to compose his shaking hands while Eddie battles with some unknown thing, his face scrunching up and falling flat intermittently.

With his mouth, he says: “I’m not _here_ to forgive you. You have to do that for yourself.”

With his eyes, he says _forgive yourself. I can’t stay here. Forgive yourself. My stomach hurts. Forgive yourself. I don’t know how to laugh. Forgive yourself. I can’t watch you like this. Forgive yourself. You are killing me Richie you are killing a dead man, **please** _

_forgive yourself._

_Forgive yourself._

_Forgive yourself._

_Forgive yourself._

Forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself until you can say it out loud, and the words break over him like cold water, and in his mind he is back in his car, back on that road. He is reversing through town as the latchkey kids smack their gum and fall away from their soda cans, as the buildings reconstruct themselves and the roads smooth out, until he is fifteen again, until he is twelve, tumbling over his clumsy shoelaces chasing the disembodied voices of his friends through the woods with his tiny, unknowing body—hiccupping over bad jokes and laughing in the underbrush until his back is prickly and his ribs hurt. There, in that cut-out piece of time, a few feet away from those sewers, he finds the truth of it.

They were kids. They didn’t deserve it.

Back at the apartment, the ringing grows louder and louder in his ears, and Richie takes one last long, haunted look at the man he knows he will love for the rest of his life before picking up the phone. He doesn’t look back.

“Hello?”


End file.
